The Hydrogen Murder (17 page)

"Thanks for inviting me," I heard Andrea say to
Jim as we were getting into a red leather-like booth. "It makes me feel
part of things to be here."

Andrea's eyes were red and puffy. She stuffed tissues into
the pocket of her rain poncho and drew a chair up to the end of the table. I
wondered if she called Matt to tell him her story about Leder's phone call to
his wife. I had no intention of asking her, however, not wanting to encourage
her to think of me as an accessory to the information. The other four of us sat
in pairs across from each other, Connie and Leder on one side, thanks to
aggressive posturing by Leder, and Jim and I on the other.

"We'll all miss him," Jim said, sounding once
again like the facilitator we all knew and loved.

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, the
principal suspects in Eric's murder were eating and drinking together, except
that this time it was breakfast, and we had Andrea instead of Janice. It
occurred to me that Eric's death had brought this group together in a way that
probably wouldn't have happened if he'd lived. Once we'd all arrived back in
the Boston area, our dinner meetings ended. I'd had a brief encounter with Jim
at a science education meeting, and we talked about getting together again, but
did nothing about it. Just like many families, I realized, coming together for
disasters.

The restaurant had a vaguely familiar feel to it, like the
ones I'd tried to avoid on my way across the country. The menus were old and
sticky and the waitresses' hands seemed to be the same. I ordered coffee and an
English muffin.

"I didn't see the detective at the funeral," Leder
said, looking at me. "Maybe he had a rough night."

I focused on the glass of water in front of me as the rest
of the group went into cover-up mode, as they had the night before.

"Let's hope he's busy tracking a killer," Connie
said.

"I saw some guys at the back of the church who looked
like Irish cops to me," Jim said.

The things we endure to get a degree, I thought, and
silently thanked my own mentor at the University of California for his pleasant
and dignified manner.

I was wrestling with the idea of bringing up the printout or
the trigger signal or the conductivity measurements, anything to get on the
track of the gas gun work. Matt's behavior the night before seemed to have
cramped my style. I half expected him to burst into the restaurant and yell at
me for sitting in the same booth with the suspects.

While I was debating with myself, the conversation went on
without me.

"Did Dominic have a good time?" Andrea asked
Connie.

"Great," Connie said. "It was nice to have
him while Bill was away. We had some good long talks."

Jim, ever vigilant to include everyone, turned to me and
asked, "Did you know Connie has a twin brother, Dominic?"

"How interesting. No, I didn't," I said.

Jim continued after the ancient waitress had filled our mugs
with coffee.

"He's a big shot chemist for a pharmaceutical
company," Jim said. "On the high-paying end of technology."

"Does he still live in Connecticut?" Andrea asked.
"It's Groton isn't it, where the big R&D facility is?"

"Yes," Connie said in a tiny, clipped voice,
clearly not wanting to pursue the topic.

If Connie hadn't looked at me at that moment, I might have
missed the significance of the information—Connie had a visitor from
Connecticut in the time frame of Eric's murder. She and I were sitting directly
opposite each other, and I caught her glance, sharp and brief, and speaking
volumes.

"They're pretty different from each other," Jim
said.

"I hear they both drive red cars, though," I said.

I thought you didn't know about him."

"Just guessing."

Connie lowered her eyes and let out a long deep breath. My
comment drew enough innocent laughter from the others to cover her reaction.
Since no one else had seen the police report, I guessed that they didn't know
about the red Corvette with Connecticut plates in the parking lot on the night
of Eric's murder.

I tried to process the picture of Connie driving her
brother's car to the lab on Tuesday night, shooting Eric in cold blood, then
going back to finish her homework for her management class.

We stayed at the table for another twenty minutes,
discussing The Red Sox, the Boston Symphony and other topics irrelevant to the
murder. I'd decided that I'd already learned enough for one meal and didn't
bring up the experiment.

Connie picked at her omelet, and seemed to have no energy,
not even to ward off Leder's arm, which he'd rested along the back of the booth
behind her.

Jim took on the job of figuring out the parts of the check.

As we moved out of the booth, Connie said, "Jim, I have
to do an errand near the church, so why don't I drop Gloria off."

~~~~

It didn't dawn on me until I was buckled into Connie's car
that if the scenario I'd just worked out was true, Connie could make me her
next victim. What would Matt say about this?

We drove in silence until we were on the highway headed
south towards Revere.

Connie kept both hands on the wheel and turned to me.

"I guess I should go to the police," she said.

"I guess you should."

"My car was out of oil. You can ask Bill. This Beemer
is a '73 on its last legs. It needs oil every week," Connie said, slamming
her hand on the steering wheel. "So I took Dominic's Corvette. I wasn't
trying to hide anything. But after what happened, I was afraid to admit I was
there."

"What were you doing at the lab at midnight?"

I'm cross-examining a murder suspect, I thought, while she's
at the wheel of a car doing sixty-five miles an hour. I might have questioned
my sanity except that I didn't believe Connie killed Eric. She isn't acting
like a murderer, I told myself, as if I had any reason to know how a murderer
acts.

Connie's fingers were gripping the wheel, her eyes focused
on the road. Once or twice I felt a lurching as she changed lanes, but for the
most part, she appeared in control.

"I knew Eric was thinking of retracting the journal
article," she said. "I went there to talk him out of it. Eric worked
late a lot, so at ten-thirty I decided to take a ride over to the lab and see
if he was there. It was better than trying to talk to him during the day with
everyone around. I figured if I could catch him off-guard, he might listen to reason.
I got there about eleven. I stayed and did some work until a little after one,
and when he didn't show up I left."

"So there is something wrong with your data?"

"Yes, I'll show you. I'll show the police. I've had it
with trying to cover it. Leder's going to get us all in trouble."

I kept my eyes on her, as if my surveillance could prevent
any dangerous moves on her part. A steak house that was famous in the area,
several motels and fast food restaurants whizzed by behind Connie's profile.

Connie turned her eyes back to me.

"I didn't kill him," she said.

I remembered Thursday's interview with Andrea.

"You're the second person who's told me that," I
said.

CHAPTER
16

As Connie pulled up at Galigani's, I remembered the fuss
Matt had made about potential murderers in my apartment. I told myself that
this was different—only one person instead of four, and she was tiny.
With this sloppy reasoning at the front of my brain, I brought Connie into my
home.

We sat at my kitchen table, the computer sheets spread out
in front of us, a paper road paved with alphanumeric characters, while Connie
explained the cover-up around the conductivity measurements.

 
"Here's the
real measurement," she said, marking several lines with a red pencil.
"We got exactly the kind of negligible number you'd expect for a gas, far
from the number we would have gotten if we'd really made a metal."

She'd taken off her navy blue suit jacket and her cropped
knit top showed off her trim form. Connie had the figure of a teenager,
although not me as a teenager. I always smiled when my women friends referred
to getting back their "girlhood figures." Mine was nothing to go back
to. Even at fifteen, I was uncomfortable tucking a blouse into my skirt, and at
fifty-five I didn't own a single belt.

Connie looked more like the cheerleaders I'd envied in high
school. I realized that she probably had to work against that image to get as
far as she had in a male-dominated field. One more reason for her to wear
extra-large T-shirts and a lab coat on the job. And to cultivate an abrasive
personality, I added, giving her the benefit of the doubt for a moment.

 
Connie pointed
to a line that ended with EX10-26, their computer's shorthand for a number that
represents a tiny fraction of a unit. I was already planning how I'd explain
the numbers to Matt—the minus sign between the 10 and the 26 represented
an infinitesimally small fraction, one so small that there wasn't a name for it
like hundredth or even billionth of a unit. In other words, Connie's team had
observed virtually no conductivity for the hydrogen in the target chamber.

"Here's where we fudged it," she said, moving the
pencil down a few lines, her jaw and shoulders more relaxed than her usual
posture. She underlined an entry with a string of at least a dozen characters
that ended with EX10+32. This number, added to the real number put the
measurement in the correct range for a metal.

"We just inserted these extra lines into the program.
There's almost zero chance that anyone would notice."

Listening to Connie's voice, you'd never guess she was
explaining how she and her colleagues had committed fraud in an attempt to
obtain a great deal of money from an unsuspecting industrial partner. I guessed
her composure was due to her relief at finally being able to tell the truth.

I wasn't sure how much tutoring Matt would need to
understand this, but I thought of making the analogy of being $26 in debt in
your checkbook, then just writing in a deposit of $32, with no cash to back it
up, making it seem you were $6 in the black. In the same way, adding EX10-26 to
EX10+32, gave the net result of EX10+6. For reference I'd explain to Matt that
pure copper metal had about that same conductivity, and that's why the team
chose 32 as the fudge factor.

Once I understood the technical aspects of the cover-up,
which I'd never have been able to figure out on my own, I picked up my
cross-examination of Connie. It was hard for me not to show the anger I felt at
this betrayal of my profession, but I remained placid while I still needed more
information from her.

"Who else knew about this?" I asked.

"Leder, of course. It was his idea, but Eric and I went
along with it. We rationalized that by the time the new facility was built, we
would have worked out the problem, and no one would be the loser."

Connie had put the pencil down and sat back in her chair.
She took a deep breath and accepted my offer of coffee. I put out a plate of
white and yellow cheeses left over from the night before and she had several
slices. Since I'd apparently ruined her breakfast, I felt an obligation to feed
her. I ignored what I thought might be Matt's response if he knew I was
entertaining an admitted fraud and possible murderer as if she were my cousin
Mary Ann from Worcester.

"So Jim's electronic trigger worked as it was supposed
to?" I asked.

"Yes. As drunk as he was, Eric didn't give anything
away at Jim's party. If anyone checked the trigger signal, everything would be
in order. I doubt that Jim knows what we did. He's not that involved in the
computations, and he's the last one we'd tell if we didn't have to. He'd be
running off to confession."

I winced at her disregard of Jim's integrity, but I let it
slide. First, I wasn't through with her, and second, just in case this
physicist who looked like a homecoming queen was really a killer.

"I'll bet it ruined the party for Leder," I said.

"You bet. He was pissed at Eric. He called a meeting of
anyone who might be worried, and smoothed everything over. He's a master at
that."

"So, basically, Leder, Eric and you are the only
partners in this fraudulent scheme?"

Connie broke down in tears,
maybe at my choice of words. I should have seen it coming, but I'd been
focusing on her answers to my questions. I wished I had current statistics on
how crying related to innocence or guilt. So far, all the women involved in
this investigation had gotten choked up or cried, including me. If all the
women were innocent and Jim was a saint, that left Leder as the only remaining
suspect. I breathed deeply and decided it might be time to tell Matt about
Leder's phone call to me.

I led Connie over to the sofa, to the same spot where Jim
had comforted Janice the night before. We talked for a while about our careers,
how difficult it was to be one of so few women in physics. When I'd received my
Ph.D. in 1968, women made up two to three percent of that population. More than
twenty-five years later, the figure had mushroomed to four to six percent. It
still wasn't crowded in the ladies' rooms of the nation's physics buildings.